The Philippine Online Chronicles

Warning: This architectural musing on Inception contains spoilers. For our review on the film, please click here.

Inception is such a movie that once you've gotten it, repeated viewings only serve to muddle and confuse the relevant issues. It’s a bit like over-reviewing for an exam; when the essentials click in your head, trying to memorize more things simply clutters up the attic of your mind. This clicking may happen after one viewing, or several, but once it happens, subsequent viewings only serve to reinforce certain details, filling in the holes in our mind.

It’s been three weekends, and Inception is still number one at the box office. In a(n American) summer full of typical summer flicks, the film that’s been called a discourse on philosophy, a treatise on filmmaking, a study on the power of the subconscious, is the best action we can get at the moment. And if this is the trend that blockbusters will take, and if the most popular form of art is reflective of contemporary society, then it seems we’re in pretty good shape. At least, until the genius that is The Expendables shows up.

Ever since its release, Inception has lived up to its name, literally setting the Internet, and good old fashioned real-life group discussion, afire with the ideas it (re)introduces, proving to be fertile ground for free-spirited arguments over coffee and other social comestibles. The movie quite literally builds so much further and further upon its established mythos that the way it ends is just icing on the ideological cake. There are some people who think that Dom Cobb is stuck in yet another dream layer, that he is actually a representation of Christopher Nolan himself (they even have the same dreamy hair, complete with widow’s peak), and that the man who plays Alfred is actually the one pulling all the strings, that the butler did, in fact, do it.

We’ll totally ignore all these trappings and go straight to the cornerstone of the movie, the underlying basis for its structure: the fact that this is a work about constructs. At its quite literal core, Inception is a movie about architecture. Where does the architect come in? Juno asks the guy who died in Titanic. Somebody’s gotta build the dream, he says.

The creation of a place, as it is ostensibly more timeless than other forms of art, since it will be a lived form of art, because it supplants itself in the collective consciousness of its surroundings, involves a number of factors. The architect must consider the location, the culture and the client when constructing a building. Because structures never rise on empty space, the constructs that predate it—the quaint townhouse with the tiny windows, the noisy and crowded train station, the corporate skyscraper with the shimmering curtain wall—are taken into account during a site inspection. A house erected in the Philippines needs windows that can be opened, and roofs that protect against the sun and rain, and must not be overly ostentatious so as not to rile the neighbors. But if your client wants it to be loud, then on their head be it. The city is a creature, with its summary parts affecting each other in a symbiotic relationship; structures influence each other and the people around them.

If buildings and their surroundings are alive, so to speak, in the real world, this is even more apparent in the dream world of Inception. Here, there are again three parts to the equation: the architect supplies the blueprints, and the dreamers and the subjects fill in the blanks. Sometimes, one person is architect, dreamer and subject at the same time, like when we see Cobb's creepy multi-level prison for his dead wife.

Dom Cobb goes to Paris to ask his father-in-law, Miles, for a suitable architect, one that can do the things that he was able to do. Miles gives him someone better. During one of the film’s most powerful scenes, their second forays into the dream world, Cobb and the not-so-subtly named Ariadne walks around a city which seems like Paris. Here, we are treated to one of the more central rules of the film: to never base one’s dream constructs on something in real life—only tiny details such as a park bench, the casing of a window, the arch on a roof are acceptable—so as not to confuse the real world with the dream world. This is analogous to an architectural rule of thumb, to make it new. Incidentally, this tenet is also followed by artists in other disciplines. The work must assume the form of the familiar, and yet be intriguingly original at the same time, a balance towards which all creators strive.

In this pseudo-Paris, as Cobb explains the principles of dream-sharing, Ariadne turns the rules of physics on its head: she folds the city on itself, erects bridges out of nowhere, and plays around with infinity mirrors. Cobb watches in approving disapproval, telling her that if she screws with the established norms too much, then his projections, the “people” who occupy this dream space, will soon realize that something is wrong. The constructs of the dreamers, the actors running around in the stage that the architects make, feel attacked when the rigging is wrong, or the curtain drops the wrong way. When things go too far out of hand, alarm bells sound, and these projections revolt, acting like white blood cells, participating in searching and destroying the invader. We feel the same way, though not as violently (one would hope) in a place that has buildings or sidewalks or bridges that do not seem to fit, where gaudy multicolored lampposts line a historic escolta, for example. We get an intangible feeling of when there is no unity, no sense of purpose in the civic organization of a place, like when one commutes around Manila. The concept of being contextually sensitive is nothing new, especially in architecture. The standbys in regional architecture are standbys for a reason. The only thing that changes is the material of creation.

The character of Arthur reinforces the critical role of the architect in the process of creation: the architect can bend the rules to his or her will, as he illustrated in the Penrose steps. Of course, this is only an optical illusion, but it is representative of the influential power of the architect in the flow of a building. As we discussed previously, there are ways of reinforcing the paths through which one’s subjects—that is, the occupants of the building—move through the maze that is created. In real life, the navigational nightmare that is Trinoma comes to mind.

The role of the dream architect is to make locales that are perceived and created at the same time. As we move throughout the dream, we fill in details that only we know. This is the primary basis for extraction—the architect makes the maze and the subject fills it with his people, with his own designs. His own subconscious populates the architect’s creation. However, the architect does play a significant role in the whole process, laying down the ground rules which the dreamer has no choice but to follow—a bank vault, a safe, a jail, for example, is a natural place in which to store secrets. The designs of the architect influence what the dreamer dreams, the trappings the dreamer places on the structure. In effect, what the architect originally planned is superseded by the own aims of the subject-dreamer. This notion, the notion of the removal of the artist from his own work, or the “death of the author,” is a familiar one to students of literature.

In architecture, however, the implications appear to be greater—buildings, after all, become part of the landscape, part of the collective consciousness of an area. When a building is finally made, it is up to its occupants to give it its identity. Whether or not the architect created the sense of verticality, a sense of power, a sense of sacredness, these remain just that: senses. The identity of a building becomes a shared experience, because there is only one building, with many subjects. Much like the dream world in Inception, it is our memories, it is our experiences, it is our own subconscious that gives life to these spaces we occupy. The architect only gives us a push.